Hugo Brandt Corstius
(Eindhoven, 1935) is one of the most productive and controversial writers in the Netherlands. In all he published more than forty books since 1966. He gained national fame as a columnist and literary critic. Brandt Corstius wrote his often cutting pieces using more than fifty pen-names. According to himself every one of them is part of his persona. His columns as Piet Grijs for VN and Stoker for the Volkskrant regularly led to controversy. In 1985 the Dutch Cabinet refused to give him the P.C.-Hooft Prize because according to the responsible minister for culture he used offence as his sole instrument: In a column Brandt Corstius had resembled the minister of finance to Adolf Eichmann. Eventually he received the prize in 1987, but owing to the riot, it had been degraded from state prize to 'ordinary' prijs. Brandt Corstius studied mathematics in Amsterdam and is a specialist in computer linguistics.
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Archive available for: Hugo Brandt Corstius
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Wintercafé 2: Hold on! Oulipo.
Hold on! Oulipo and the literary restriction: If you play the game, you make the rules. The French OuLiPo company (Ouvroir Littéraire Potentielle, founded in 1960) thought that with self-imposed literary restrictions one could write potentially interesting texts. In which only the e as a vowel would occur, or a poem in which all the letters of the alphabet would recur.This programme, a co-production of Wintertuin (Nijmegen) and festival Winternachten (The Hague) is a tribute to the writers, mathematicians and philosophers of OuLiPo. Four writers, Saskia de Coster, Karin Amamoetkrin, Anton Valens and Joke van Leeuwen were given a restriction by writer/mathematician Hugo Brandt Corstius in Nijmegen. Now the four writers and their 'patron' get together in The Hague to read the results. Meanwhile, all the texts will have been published in a handy-sized booklet – available at Winternachten in a limited edition!
At the end of this hour there is a performance by saxophonist and composer Maarten Ornstein and Joshua Samson (percussion). Ornstein composed music to poems of the South African poet Ronelda Kamfer. In Dutch.
